sparkling heaps of gold and jewels, was his brain nigh turned by their value and consideration in the eyes of the world; and his mind, dazzled by the apparent immensity of the gifts offered, would incline to evil; but ever and anon these thoughts were opposed by a secret power and influence within him, that never failed to warn him of the eternal misery that must ensue from such a choice as his despair had at first prompted.

"Wavering, irresolute worm of dust, canst thou hesitate between yon puny thing of ethereal cloud and I-look at the immensity of value that surrounds thee!-think of what they will afford thee when they are thine! Once again, I

tell thee choose!"

His intended victim still hesitated.

"Reptile of humanity, art thou so wedded to thy wretched state: If thou wouldst be great, snap the cross thou holdest!" and his voice, wrought up to wrath, sounded like the thunder of the sky, as it was echoed through the subterranean regions.

Wernerstoff trembled in fear and agony: the cold perspiration ran down his face, as his eye quailed under the terrific glance of his tempter. Terror was on the point of superseding inclination, when the silvery voice of his warning angel sounded in his ear in encouraging accents of softness that inspired his mind with firmness and confidence. As he at once formed his decision to obey his better angel, his spirit, previously clogged by the dull, heavy weights of combined misery and despair, seemed now of ethereal lightness and buoyancy. His tempter saw and trembled in impotent malice.

"Thus do I reject thy infernai offer," exclaimed Wernerstoff, in accents firm and loud, that convulsed the fiend with fury. "Warned by a spirit divine, I reject and spurn thee in the omnipotent name of him, the emblem of whose meekness and suffering thus I worship."

As he spoke, he elevated the cross in triumph, and had just advanced it within an inch of his lips, when-oh, horror to relate!-it broke in the firm compression of his grasp.

The long-drawn, mournfully aspirated sigh of his ministering angel, sounded in his ears; the overbarthening weights of anguish and despair oppressed his sinking spirit, as a blaze of burning flame appeared filling the cavern with a sulphurous, suffocating smoke. The ground began to quake and crack, and Wernerstoff gave himself up for lost, as the loud triumphant yell of the fiend rose terrifically exulting fabove the fearful chorus of ten thousand rejoicing voices, issuing from the horrible fiery abyss at the further extremity of the vault.

Almost instantly, the wretched and miserable Wernerstoff began to feel the smothering influence of the suffocating and burning vapour, and as he gazed in despairing anguish, mentally and bodily, upon the sable-habited fiend before

him, surrounded in flame and brandishing a barbed spear as he stood exultingly over him, he felt that he would have given worlds had he possessed them, to be again the late unhappy, miserable creature he had previously thought himself.

"Ha! ha! thou'rt forfeit! Prepare, thou puerile victim of my will-prepare to receive the shining metal thou lovest so well, in molten streams, down thy parched throat. Thou shalt roll in wealth-shalt swim upon the burning surface of thy favourite ore. And life-life, too, thou shalt have beyond thy extremest thought-aye, for ever."

As he thus spoke in tones of rumbling thunder to his trembling victim, who was quivering on the shaking earth, his height seemed to grow colossal, and streams of burning lava gushed from his rolling eyes, as the echoes of his fiendish laughter shook the subterranean cavern to its centre, that was gradually becoming filled with fire.

"Thus, miserable fool of blighted ambition, do I hurl thee to the exulting fiends who wait to welcome thee!"

Brandishing his trident, he stepped over his hapless and groaning victim, from whom "hope had withering fled," and poising it aloft, was in the act to strike, when, at that fearful and eventful moment that Wernerstoff expected the dreadful blow to descend, he was lifted suddenly up from the crumbling ground, and hurried through the air with a power infinite, which the sweet tones of confidence that rang in his ears, announced to belong to his guardian angel.

"Our victim! our victim!" shouted the deafening roar of a group of fiends surrounded in flames, as Wernerstoff, in renewed terror, saw himself and his guardian spirit closely pursued, while in horror he writhed from the almost grasping talons of his tormentors.

"But another moment and thou art safe," whispered the magic-toned voice of his protector in his ear; but, at the same moment, Wernerstoff beheld his late tempter within a few feet of him, soaring on an immense pair of pinions and brandishing his lightning-tipt trident, while his countenance flamed with rage and malignity.

"Thou art mine-my victim-and thus do I mark thee for my own through the grave and eternity!" rung in the terror-stricken ears of Wernerstoff, whose feelings again assumed the impress of despair, as a low trembling, half-drawn sigh quivered on the lips of the being that upheld him; at the same moment he received the descending point of the trident in his forehead; his eyes appeared to strike a myriad of lights-a confused number of wild images flashed before him-an uproar of voices died echoingly away upon his ears-his brain reeled, and he felt precipitated to the earth, insensible, and for a while eternity seemed to claim him for its own.

*

THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS.

Or the great painters of other nations there is not one with whom an untravelled Englishmen is better acquainted, than with Peter Paul Rubens. Every individual amongst us, with the least knowledge of art, or the history of painting has read of Rubens's visit to this country; and there is not a gallery, or scarcely a nobleman's seat in England, but can boast of some specimen of his productions. They have been made, as it were, Briton's by adoption. Dr. Waagen, in his "Life and Genius" of the celebrated artist, says, for example, that "Blenheim contains more original works by the hand of Rubens, than are to be found in any other private gallery in Europe."

Every person at all conversant with art knows that the works of Rubens are exceedingly numerous. "The orders he received," Dr. Waagen writes," were far too numerous to allow of his executing them all with his own hands; he usually contented himself with furnishing the sketches only, leaving the greater part of the work to be executed by his pupils, and then merely putting the finishing touches to the whole."

Now, although it must be admitted that pictures on which such eminent painters worked as several that ranked amongst his scholars, could not be unsuccessful; yet it is necessarily impossible that these pieces could display such consistency and individuality in conception and execution as those which emanated from the pencil of the master alone. The catalogue of works of art in the possession of Rubens at his death, contained three hundred and nineteen pictures.

About a thousand of his productions have been engraved. To illustrate the celerity with which he worked, but one fact is sufficient, that the famous altarpiece of St. Roch, in Acost, was begun and finished in eight days. The fertility of his ideas was prodigious. They seemed to have gushed forth on his canvas like a torrent, overpowering his judgment, confused by their own superabund

ance.

According to Byron, who, however, as he admits, had little feeling for art, Rubens painted nothing more than repetitions of wives, and allegories, with an infernal glare of colour. But Rubens did something more than this. There was, indeed, no walk of art he left unadorned: the highest scriptural subjects received illustrations from his vigorous pencil; to the pages of history and poetry he gave body and magnificence: and seldom as he practised it, he was never greater than in landscape. He seems to have left, as Dr. Waagen observes, no aspect in nature unattempted; his portraits were Vandyke's example, and his animals have been unexcelled by Snyders or